


let all become mid-ocean

by cloudcloakedwords



Category: Alex Stern - Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Angst, F/M, Healing, darlington comes back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23256196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudcloakedwords/pseuds/cloudcloakedwords
Summary: Darlington comes back, but he's not the same. Alex tries to help him through it.
Relationships: Darlington/Alex Stern
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	let all become mid-ocean

**Author's Note:**

> I finished Ninth House in a day and loved it. I read this theory online that the murder that Darlington committed was having a hand in his grandfather's death, and I kind of just went off from that. Enjoy!!

When Darlington comes back from hell, Alex isn't sure whether she really knows him anymore. Physically, he is still the same brown-haired senior that dresses like he’s just stepped out of a Tumblr dark academia page. But he is too quiet and doesn’t correct her when she purposefully butchers Latin phrases to try to get a reaction out of him. They bring him back to Black Elm, hoping that the familiar house will make his transition back to the world of the living a little easier.

  
What Alex doesn’t count on is finding Darlington slumped in the armchair in his grandfather’s old room at three in the morning, shaking. His hair is sticking out everywhere, and his eyes are wide and bloodshot, and Alex can’t help but flash back to that night at Manuscript, and she is angry again—angry at Manuscript and Sandow and Belbalm and herself for not doing anything, for being frozen to the spot as Darlington vanished into the mouth that night.

  
He doesn’t look up as she enters the room. His eyes are fixed on his grandfather’s bed, and when she kneels down beside him, she has to shake his shoulders a little to get his attention. He even feels different from before—his shoulders are too bony and Alex is half-afraid that if she’ll somehow damage him if she shakes too hard. He doesn’t look human, doesn’t look like the Darlington she knew.

  
“You need to sleep,” she says. She tries to make her voice as stern as possible, to try to mimic what he might do if their positions were reversed. “We have to oversee a prognostication tomorrow, so you need your sleep for that.”

  
He doesn’t respond.

  
“Dawes is worried sick about you. I’m worried sick about you. Can you please just go to bed?”

  
His voice is a whisper. “I see it when I sleep.”

“See what? The h-word?”

  
Darlington rolls his eyes, and Alex feels a little bit of the tension leave her. He must be feeling at least a little bit better if she managed to elicit that reaction. “Don’t be such a child. You can say it, you know. I won’t shatter if I hear that word.”

  
“Then what?” A long pause. Alex can see his throat bob. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. “I see my grandfather. The last time I spoke to him.”

  
“Did you see him? Down there?”

  
She knows that she shouldn’t have asked that when Darlington shrinks into himself further.

“I didn’t look. I didn’t want to see him. I couldn’t face him.” Alex sits down on the floor next to the armchair and drapes her arm across his knees.

  
He continues, breathing hard, “He asked me to do it, Alex. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t deny him that.”

  
Then he lets out a soft cry that sounded like it belonged somewhere in the deep bowels of the place that they had fished him out of.

  
“Look at me.” He reluctantly complies, and his eyes are haunted, nothing like the eyes of the self-assured senior she had known. “What your grandfather asked you to do was horrible and messed-up and very morally gray, but it got you back. Without doing that, you wouldn’t have made gentleman demon status and you wouldn’t be back here and then Dawes would have cried her eyes out for the rest of eternity.”

  
“I killed him, Alex. He asked me to and I did it. What kind of sick person does that?” His body is seizing with dry sobs, and she can do nothing but hug his knees and grip his hand tightly. It is clammy but still soft—the same hands of the man before. The hands of a man, not a demon.

  
_Let all become mid-ocean._

  
“He was sick. He was dying. He wanted to go on his own terms. You eased it. Is that not what we do? Make things just a little easier for everyone?”

  
“It was murder in the eyes of magic.” He wrenches his hand out of her grasp and gestures wildly to himself, half-rising from the chair.” “My very existence now proves that.”

  
“It was mercy to me.”

  
He slumps back into the chair.

  
She keeps going. “It was mercy to him and to me and to Dawes and to all of us. You gave him the passing he wanted. Let all become mid-ocean, right? You just made it easier for him, let him pass into the waves on his own terms. And who cares what magic thinks about that? It’s not exactly the gold standard of morality, and you know that too. You think cutting an unwitting someone open to read their entrails to predict stock prices is morally right? You survived the hellhound because of the mercy you granted your grandfather. You’re back because of that, and now Dawes won’t spend the rest of eternity mourning you instead of working on her dissertation. Now I’m not a Dante without a Virgil anymore. What would I have done without you?”

  
Darlington is breathing a little easier, although the sharp breaths he’s taking are still hitching in his throat. His cheeks are wet, his face crumpled, his shirt stained with dark patches. But he is human.

  
“You’d have found a way to survive. You always do. You’re a miracle.”

  
“You mean it’s a miracle that I’m still alive,” she jokes.

  
He tilts his head down to look at her, and for second, she thinks she sees fire in those eyes. “No. I mean that you’re a miracle, Galaxy Stern.”


End file.
